Double Oscar Nominee & Producer Shane Boris Talks What ‘Fire of Love’ & ‘Navalny’ Have in Common

Awards Daily talks to double Oscar nominee, Shane Boris, who produced Best Documentary Feature contenders Fire of Love and Navalny.

Producer Shane Boris has some stiff competition in the Best Documentary Feature category: himself. Boris is the only producer other than Walt Disney to be nominated in the documentary category two times in the same year, and as producer on both Fire of Love and Navalny, he’s watched both projects go back and forth against each other this awards season leading up to the Oscars.

“We made the films at the same time, we premiered the films at the same time,” says Boris, “and we’ve been doing this awards season at the same time. We sort of joined forces. It’s pretty incredible to have both of those teams all together and by my side certainly. We call each other, ‘Fire of Navalny Love.'”

While both films have received accolades, they couldn’t be more different. One is a love story between to volcanologists (who love volcanoes as much as they love each other), and the other follows Alexei Navalny who survived an assassination attempt from the Russian government. Despite having contrasting loglines, Boris actually believes the two projects have similarities.

“For me, they both speak to our orientation towards fear and uncertainty in this world and in this life. In the case of Navalny, it’s Alexei’s message that we can’t be afraid to stand up against authoritarianism and to look at what’s happening and to do everything in our power, no matter the consequences, to conjure that bravery. If we don’t, all of these forces in the world will continue to steamroll over everything we hold dear.”

With two lovers camping out on a volcano (which actually happens in the doc), there’s obviously an element of fear in Fire of Love as well.

“Maurice and Katia went to the brink of existential uncertainty and to that spiritual dimension to ‘Why are things made?’ and ‘Where do things go when they’re destroyed?’—the ever unknown. To move closer to that, even though we’re certain we’ll never fully know and to live in that space of uncertainty, takes an incredible fearlessness in a way.”

Both documentaries are also filmed in completely different ways with unique difficulties. Fire of Love pulled 250 hours of archival footage from the Kraffts’ personal collection (without sound!) and aimed to show the love between two people who didn’t really show a lot of love on screen, but it also met another lofty goal.

“The larger issue with Fire of Love was we knew that we wanted to tell a story of what are some of the most important themes ever—love and love for each other and love for this alive, sentient earth that we share. How can we do that in a way that also does justice to the Kraffts’ extraordinary archive and to their lives, too?”

On the other hand, filming Navalny felt like you were sitting on something explosive that wasn’t a volcano.

“For Navalny, we had a lot of production challenges. Keeping the film in complete secrecy while we were shooting, only producing the film with encrypted messaging for an entire year. Not even telling our families about it until days before the premiere. It was an extremely challenging project to produce and then also to get the film right, to make sure that we could make a nuanced, complicated portrait of a politician who uses films and media for his own purposes, but also that we could tell the story of this very important now-political prisoner and anti-war activist.

Even before they were awards contenders, Boris knew that both films were deeply meaningful and well-crafted.

“I hoped audiences would see what I saw in them—when I decided to work on them and help bring them to life—and also when I saw the finished films. We made Fire of Love in Sara Dosa’s house. It was a grassroots, all-coming-together collage film. When we got into Sundance, I think we had a feeling that some kind of alchemy, some kind of concoction that we were going for, worked.”

For Navalny, there’s a different kind of impact Boris sought after.

“It was always a hope for the film to be as far and wide as possible, for the purpose of keeping Alexei’s name in the global consciousness and shining a light on what he’s doing against autocrats and authoritarianism around the world.”

Fire of Love is available on Disney+ and Hulu; Navalny is available on HBO Max.